FWIW, I've been to a few large-scale Nerf events and they were a healthy mix of dude-bro gun enthusiasts (on account of the hobby being eminently gun-adjacent) and queer folk flying their flags, and they were all having a great time together.

You know, when people said "Modern games are like movies that you can play," I don't think they meant to emphasize the optional meaning of the word "can."

Daybreakers

Jupiter Ascending

The Matrix: Resurrections

Isn't that the plot of Gemini Man? And The 6th Day? And Blade Runner?

Also a valid theory, and less complicated than the parallel universe kidnap victim theory.

Thomas Riker isn't a transporter duplicate, he's a kidnap victim from a parallel dimension.

Thomas Riker supposedly proved that the transporter can be used to duplicate sentient living beings. So why aren't there mass-produced transporter duplicates? There are plenty of unscrupulous powers that would love to exploit this existential loophole and create huge armies of Jem Hadar or some such. They would have no ethical limitations on making such things, and broadly speaking if a scientific / engineering problem CAN be solved then it WILL be solved, and doubly more so when someone proves that it definitely CAN be solved.

Because the theory of his creation is wrong. He wasn't duplicated by the interference field, his transport beam was filtered through a parallel dimension and back, and captured Thomas from his home dimension and dropped him in ours. Thanks to the Mirror Universe, we know that transporter fuckery can cause trans-dimensional transporting. When they discovered Thomas, they got the interpretation of the phenomenon wrong, and set everyone on a drastically wrong path of research. His duplication hasn't been duplicated, because he was never duplicated to begin with.

I've said it before and I'll say it again:

In the TNG episode Lonely Among Us Captain Picard gets taken over by an alien energy being. It hijacks his body and he teleports himself into a cloud of dispersed particles in a nebula. They spend more than an hour trying to recover him, and are about to give up, when Troi senses his consciousness, and they are able to reconstitute him through the transporter. This, and other mentions of "mental energy" in the show indicate that there is a canonical, scientific proof of the existence of the soul independent from the body, and that it can be transported without damage.

Anything more involved than that gets into philosophical debates about whether or not you die every time you go to sleep, and is about as useful a conversation as whether or not you can "know" if you are or aren't a brain in a jar.

I'm sad that David Bowie died without ever getting cast as The Dark Knight Returns-era Joker.

"Christian Bale or Ben Affleck as Batman?"

"Michael Keaton!"

Toot toot. Patta pum patta pum.

There's still time to confirm my extreme edge case hypothesis that Donald Trump's entire political career has been a carefully constructed and coordinated live-action worst-case-scenario demonstration meant to shock people out of their complacency and demonstrate in real time just how bad an unhinged president could be and forever ruin the public's faith in the Republican party by actively ruining everything he touches.

I'll be honest, I kind of gave up on this theory in about 2017 or so, but then again we came back around to using medical leeches, so anything is possible.